TONIGHT In NYC: Free JMG Pride Party & Marriage Celebration With Open Wine Bar & Legendary Drag Performer Jackie Beat!

If you're in Manhattan tonight, please consider joining me and fellow JMG readers for a special Pride Party in the private lounge at the Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23 Street. Beginning at 10pm we'll have an open wine and champagne bar courtesy of Barefoot Wines. Slurp! Come celebrate one of the greatest victories in LGBT history!

AND the first 20 people to respond to this email: JMGParty@gmail.com will start the evening with free tickets to the new show by legendary drag performer Jackie Beat, Pray Away The Gay. (Enter the discount code "JMG" for $18 tickets if you don't make the freebie cut.)

I'm looking forward to seeing lots of you there!

Happy New Year!

Well, it was quite eventful year for this here website thingy. We saw over 15 million hits on just under 8000 posts where all you crazy kids left about one million comments. As a friend of mine likes to say, blogging is like a homework assignment that's never done but always due. But somehow after almost seven years of JMG, I'm having even more fun than ever, thanks largely to hugely participative nature of what we do here and all of your emails, tips, and hard work.

Here's just a few highlights from a very busy JMG year: We got some nice recognition from a major media personality for our part in bringing down a loathsome homophobe. We freeped polls, crashed the website of an anti-gay gubernatorial candidate, and sent uncountable minions demanding redress from corporations. We were thrust unexpectedly into the national media due to the hate speech of a Senate staffer whose equally homophobic boss was forced into a public apology. I made my network television debut and cohosted my first fundraiser for a U.S. Senator. For the cherries on 2010, I was humbled to be honored by the Ali Forney Center and to be named Best Political Blog by the Village Voice.

And I was lucky enough to meet hundreds of you great folks at JMG meet-ups in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Fort Lauderdale, Philadelphia, and Montreal and New York! Whew! I'm grateful to all of you for continuing readership, for your unflagging commitment to equality, and for your, ahem, vociferous participation here in the JMG community. Tonight, I'll be raising my glass to each and every one of you. I'll be raising it a lot! Thank you all.

Thank You, Governor Paterson

As his final day in office winds to a close for Governor David Paterson, LGBT New Yorkers should offer him our thanks for being the most relentlessly and loudly pro-gay governor in state and arguably, national history. Our state movement's two most important pieces of legislation, GENDA and marriage equality, remain unattained, but that, of course, is due to our clown car of a state Senate and is no fault of the governor's.

Paterson, to his everlasting credit and over the loud protests of bigots, issued an executive order protecting state employees in New York from discrimination based on gender identity and expression. In May 2008, he directed state agencies to recognize out of state same-sex marriages, a move countered by numerous (and unsuccessful) lawsuits. And if there was a marriage equality rally or an angry protest, we usually showed up to find Governor Paterson at the podium or on a bullhorn. Probably my most memorable moment of Paterson's tenure was watching him stand in a pouring rain in Washington Square to deliver an impassioned speech against the bullying and abuse of LGBT youth.

And let's not forget Gov. Paterson's unexpected selection of an obscure upstate legislator with wobbly bona fides to fill the formidable shoes of then Sen. Hillary Clinton. Many questioned that move at the time (myself included), but Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has surprised us all and turned into a powerful and effective advocate for LGBT New Yorkers. Sen. Gillibrand may turn out to be Paterson's most enduring legacy for the good of our movement.

We've had the occasional disagreement with Gov. Paterson, in particular the continuing exclusion of indigent HIV patients from the state's rent relief program for the seriously ill. But even that bad decision grew out of the state's financial morass and not from animus. Today, let's thank Governor David Paterson for his support of the LGBT community and hope that one day soon, we'll again see thousands of New Yorkers happily marching in the NYC Pride Parade wearing stickers proclaiming "We Luv Our Guv!"

JMG Thanks Reader Dave Evans!

As a very active week on JMG comes to a close (almost 200 posts!), I'd like to take a moment to thank reader Dave Evans of Cleveland, who via his video news clipping work provides us with many breaking items of LGBT interest. Dave scours the cable outlets and chat shows for relevant items and often has them posted to his YouTube channel many hours (or days) before the networks themselves.

Best of all (for us) he can often track down clips upon my special request, even if it means the kid stays up half the night waiting on a news show rerun. And as some of you have noted, some proprietary video players (CNN, Vevo, Logo) can cause browsers to crash, but Dave is always there to repost the clip to the relatively browser-friendly YouTube. So snaps to gay news junkie Dave Evans from us all for helping keep JMG as up-to-the-minute as possible.

Some JMG Stuff

As our JMG comment threads frequently now reach far beyond 100 responses, the comments service provider has helped me increase the one-page comment limit to 500. (It used to be 20!) If you'd prefer shorter comment thread pages, let me know.

And as I mentioned last week, I've just about reached Facebook's (arbitrary) friends limit, so I've been forced to create a JMG fan page. I'm still reposting JMG items to both my personal Facebook page and the fan page, but eventually I'll be primarily using the fan page to post breaking items, updates, and other news-ish bits that don't make it to the blog. I encourage to you post your own items there as well, even just to share with others on the fan page.

Also there's the JMG Twitter feed, which automatically pings all new blog posts and to which readers send me many news tips. As readership on this here website thingy continues to mushroom, my blogging process is becoming, probably necessarily, even more collaborative with you folks. I don't say it enough, but I very much appreciate all the emails, the tweets, the Facebook tips...everything...even if I often can't get back to all of you personally.

Finally, yet another reminder about commenting decorum. Please be aware that the enemies of our people often harvest your comments here for publication elsewhere. (And as the staffer of a certain GOP Senator recently learned, there is NO such thing as internet anonymity.) As I've said here often, one of the reasons that JMG has the most, ahem, robust commenting community of the LGBT blogosphere is that your words are unmoderated and uncensored.

So feel free to run your filthy fucking mouths, shout down the asshats, and say whatever needs to be said. But you may absolutely not make threats of physical harm, however idle. Please email me at JoeMyGod@gmail.com if you see such comments and I will dispatch them. Bear hugs and tall frosty beers to you all.